by Mortal Wombat

I have to come clean. After being challenged by brave, vigilant freethinkers to "WAKE UP, SHEEPLE" and being confronted with thought-provoking questions like "HOW do u SLEEP AT NITE when u NO the TRUTH about 911 but contenue to perpatrate the LIE" I see no way out but to confess. Yes, I have been paid off by the government to perpetrate its lies and quash new ideas that we are afraid of.

I'm probably going to keep doing it because the money's pretty good, but you guys deserve to know the truth.

Here is how it all went down.

It all started in early 1969 when President John F. Kennedy (not actually assassinated of course, but disguised in his new assumed identity as "Lyndon B. Johnson" in order to carry out unpopular policies without sullying his legacy) came knocking at my door.

Even in his "Lyndon B. Johnson" incarnation, Kennedy was remarkably persuasive, ending even the most vehement objections with a full, luscious kiss on the lips.

"I, ah, need your help," he said Bostonianly. "As you, ah, know, I am not actually Lyndon B. Johnson but the man you once knew as John F. Kennedy."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, yes, of course. Everyone knows that."

"And that's just the problem," said Kennedy. "Our government cover-up department is in a shambles. People are asking all kinds of questions about the `assassination' and at this point I doubt our ability to fake an orgasm, let alone a moon landing."

"A... moon landing?" I gasped.

"That's right, you heard me," he said, sounding more and more Bostonian as he became animated. "I said I was going to put a man on the moon, and by God I have put too much work into my goal of having Americans say 30 years from now that JFK was awesome to let a thing like that ruin my dream."

"Why can't you just put a man on the moon then?" I asked.

"My God, the aliens!" said Kennedy impatiently. "They'll blow us out of the sky before we can set one lander on lunar soil. That's why I came to you. I've heard things from my people - good people, good men - that you're an authority-trusting easily-led sheep."

"That's me," I said proudly.

"And also, that you are an unscrupulous and brilliant conspirator capable of deceiving your own countrymen with no moral qualms."

"That's also me," I admitted easily.

"Well, I'm going to have to ask you to fake a moon landing. It doesn't have to look that good. Most people haven't been on the moon before. Just make it look like a desert or something."

"I can do that," I said.

"In return, we'll pay you $5 million that we were going to spend on poverty and if you do a good job, we'll keep you in mind for future work."

"Yes sir," I said. "You won't be disappointed. I'm looking forward to deceiving some Americans with you. It's an honor, sir, a real honor." I shook his hand enthusiastically, and he smiled that charismatic smile.

So I called up my family, and my mom and dad and my brother came over, and my mom held the camera while me and my dad pretended to be astronauts. Looking back on it now, it does look pretty fake, but you have to keep in mind the standards for special effects back then. There weren't any computers or anything yet. I think I did a pretty good job for what I had.

That's my dad. He's actually lost a lot of weight since then. In retrospect, we should have moved the furniture out of the way but nobody complained.

As you might have been able to tell from the fact I titled my previous section "The Beginning", that was only the beginning. Soon after that, the jobs started coming fast. I was dealing with aliens left and right - sometimes helping to integrate them into society (Elvis, Bob Dylan), sometimes killing them and hiding the bodies, and sometimes anal probing them to sort of teach them an object lesson about the shoe being on the other foot.

Which one we went with depended on a complex amount of factors, depending on the day of the week and whether the guy in charge was on good terms with his wife that day. Sometimes when it wasn't going so well, he would say something like, "What? Oh, probe it or something. Use the coldest, nastiest probe you got. Cold and frigid like a god damn iceberg, thinking she's got me wrapped around her finger. Well, I got news for you, bitch! You want me to keep buying you your dresses and diamonds, you better hold up your end of the deal, and you know damn well I didn't marry you for your tiny bird brain. A fist through your face, that's what you're gonna get if you don't learn your place. Right through that pretty little face! That's what's gonna happen."

"You mean the alien subject?" I would say.

"The... what?" he would reply, suddenly confused. "Oh, sure, that too." Then he'd walk off cursing.

Anyway, we ended up doing a lot of weird things to those aliens, but I can't say it wasn't a lot of fun.

During this time, I gradually figured out that people like JFK and my maritally-challenged boss weren't really at the top of the food chain, both figuratively and literally. The people who were really running things weren't even people at all, but lizards. At the top of the whole evil behind-the-scenes network was a council of Jewish lizards known as the Illuminati.

Now, as you might realize, lizards aren't nearly photogenic enough to actually occupy any public leadership positions. There was a point at which the leadership was getting a little creative and out-of-the-box and took a shot at it with Nixon, but it went pretty badly and the lizard who thought it up was executed. After that, it was back to the tried-and-true method of having charismatic human figureheads like Kennedy.

The bonus, from the perspective of the Illuminati, was that after you had no more use for the charismatic human leader, he would make a tasty snack. Kennedy was actually so good that they got greedy and ate Bobby Kennedy before they had really finished making use of him, which ended up costing them in the long term.

I had no idea of any of this at first, but after I started moving up the chain, bits and pieces were revealed. It wasn't until 2001 that I actually met the council in person though.

Here's me hanging out with High Council Member Moshe Goldstein. He's pretty cool in person.

So it was in early 2001 that I actually got summoned to the chamber of the Illuminati to discuss a "really big job" that was going to "blow me out of the water". I admit I was intrigued, and I was so excited about it that I had to poop right before the meeting and I ended up being late.

I was surprised to see all the people there. Up in front was a little raised stage where the lizards all sat behind a stone table, and the room was filled with all kinds of humans. There was George Bush and Dick Cheney, and Tony Blair, and Rush Limbaugh, and the presidents of the milk companies we were using to poison Americans, and all our best mind-control scientists, and the Popular Mechanics editorial staff, and Big Oil, and the entire mainstream media, and about 3000 random construction workers and policemen.

It was a little crowded.

Anyway, I managed to find a seat somehow. The lizards said that we should all be proud to be part of the greatest conspiracy since hiding clues about Jesus' kid. Then they spilled it. We were going to run some planes into buildings and kill 5000 innocent people. Everybody seemed okay with that.

"Any questions?" asked one of the lizards.

The room was pretty quiet, filled with murmurs of approval, but something was nagging at me, so I raised my hand. "Um, why are we doing this?" I asked.

"Good question," said one of the lizards. "The reason we're doing this is to frame al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization in Afghanistan, which will result in a war in Iraq."

"Wait, wait, wait," said one of the other lizards. "That doesn't make any sense at all. Why wouldn't we pretend the terrorists came from Iraq then?"

"God damn it," said another lizard, "I told you guys to work this out before the meeting."

"I did have it all worked out," sighed the first lizard. "Maybe if Aaron would just trust me a little bit. It's all very complex."

"All right, Josh," said Aaron, puffing out his neck frill, "then how about you explain why we want a war in Iraq in the first place."

Josh rolled his bulging eyes. "Oil, of course. Once we take over Iraq, we'll have access to all its oil."

"So what you're saying," said Aaron, "is that if Americans think Afghan terrorists attacked America, they'll be okay with taking over the entire country of Iraq and taking all its oil."

"That's exactly what I'm saying," said Josh. The Big Oil table applauded him politely.

Aaron just stared at him.

"Um, excuse me," said one of the smaller lizards. "Did we... did I miss the meeting where we talked about Iraq? I was under the impression that we were doing this to create a climate of fear so that we could invoke draconian laws and repress Americans' freedom."

"You fucking moron," said Josh, completely exasperated, "what the hell are you talking about? It's been about Iraq the whole damn time."

"What about Afghanistan?" said another lizard.

"IT'S VERY COMPLEX!" shouted Josh. "JUST TRUST ME, OKAY? JUST WORK WITH ME A LITTLE!"

"Look, I don't know what's going on with the whole Iraq or Afghanistan thing," said one of the other lizards, "but I was told that we were doing this so that our friends' businesses could profit from reconstruction afterwards. Nobody told me about the freedom thing or the oil thing."

"It was supposed to be about quashing freedoms," said the small lizard, very persistent for his (her?) diminutive size.

"It was supposed to be about expanding the global American empire," said another lizard.

"FUCK YOU GUYS!" said Josh, and stormed out.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"This is all your fault, Aaron," said one of the lizards, throwing Aaron a reproachful look, and took off out the back door saying, "Josh, c'mon man. C'mon."

So the meeting was postponed until the next week, and that's when they gave us all our assignments. I was supposed to do the smoke.

This was actually a rough draft. The notes I got back said "not sinister enough".

Just for fun, I tried putting a Satan into one of my smoke clouds, kind of like a little Easter egg for myself. I didn't think anyone else would notice but I guess they did.

Well, I don't know how the lizards' argument turned out but I guess Josh didn't get his way since I don't see a lot of free oil around these days. I was hoping to be able to quash freedoms a little more, especially because the other day I was at the supermarket and I bought some acne meds and the checker kind of looked at my face and laughed at me, and I couldn't put him in jail for that or anything.

This is the shittiest police state ever.

We thought we had the whole repression thing going pretty good, but then the Dixie Chicks made some pretty mean comment about George Bush and we couldn't even put them in jail, not even for like a day. We talked to our lawyers about, like, maybe we could ban them from radio and stuff, but they said no. They said maybe Americans could just stop listening to them, but that would be only if they felt like it and we couldn't really make them if they didn't want to.

It turns out a lot of people felt like refusing to listen to them, which I guess is good, but we weren't allowed to make them do it, which I think is pretty lame.

Just between you and me, I think maybe the Illuminati need to visit China sometime and see how a real police state does it. They got oppression down.

The real bummer is that a lot of people seem to have caught on to the 9/11 thing, which I personally think is because the lizards were way too loud when they were arguing. You should really whisper when you're talking about secret stuff.

Maybe we got a little sloppy, but we honestly had no idea that there were so many brilliant and vigilant Americans out there who would be able to see through our charade. I don't have a mustache, but I ended up having to buy a fake one and put it on so I could twirl it and howl "Curses!" every time someone saw through one of our cover-ups.

I can't believe that after all the money we spent buying off everyone in the world with a degree in engineering or any experience in the field of engineering (the Popular Mechanics staff was really expensive), it turned out that degrees in English or social science were all you needed to understand structural collapse and see through the implausibilities in our plan.

And to be fair, I did warn the Pentagon team that they should at least put a real plane there, but man, were they a bunch of lazy asses. They were like, "No, no one will notice there's no plane there. We just shout PLANE CRASH and run around a bit and everyone will believe us." I had to spend like five hours arguing with them before they agreed to at least blow up the side of the building or something. I mean, we had bought off every corporation in America. We had spare airplanes coming out of our asses. But they were too lazy to pick up the damn phone and give a time and date for it to be delivered, so no plane. Well I hope killing that dragon in World of Warcraft was worth it, you lazy fucks.

The government project World of Warcraft, designed to addict and control teenagers all over the world, was actually well underway in 2001, in beta-testing at the Pentagon.

The other thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was obviously that other tower collapsing too late. We didn't set up timers or an automated trigger or anything like that because - I don't know, Warcraft I guess. We had it set up just like in the Road Runner cartoons where the coyote pushes this lever down on a big box, and the spark goes down a fuse and blows up some dynamite. So there was one guy to push the lever for each tower. We didn't have any backups or contingency plans or anything in case the guy couldn't do it, because that would have hurt their feelings. So I guess, bad luck. The guy on that tower missed the signal because he was on the phone, and as it turns out it was his girlfriend breaking up with him, so I could understand. Still, this was a world-wide conspiracy here, maybe he could show a little professionalism.

I will say that there is one thing I'm proud of, though, and that was paying off every single one of the thousands of witnesses and experts. We really didn't have a lot of time to pay off the witnesses in particular, since we had to do it like that day. Can you imagine what it's like going to 10,000 individuals and explaining the whole deal to them and negotiating a payout, all in one day? That is like a time-space paradox on the order of Santa Claus. But we did it, and the even more amazing thing is that not one of them talked. That is one hell of a success rate, and I think the Pentagon goofballs could learn a little about work ethic from this team.

So that's the truth. If you don't mind, I'm going to keep telling everybody the government's story in interviews and articles and stuff, and I'm going to keep executing the occasional person who gets too chatty about the truth, because a $10,000 check every month is nothing to sneeze at.

If you want to get in on the deal, you can just shoot me an email at wombat@meanestbear.com.